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When one of Japan's top salon booking services needed to expand its online reach, it used page feeds fueled by Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) technology. Find out how Hot Pepper Beauty used AdWords to attract more customers, increase conversions, and lower costs.

Goals

Expand online visibility at scale

Drive more salon bookings

Increase return on investment

Approach

Implemented DSA with page feeds

Used ad customizers to customize creatives

Structured campaigns by product category with custom labels

Applied Smart Bidding (Target CPA)

Results

90% reduction in operations workload

23% higher click-through rates (CTR)

8% lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA)

4% lower cost-per-click (CPC)

Hot Pepper Beauty is one of Japan's largest online salon booking sites for people looking to update their personal styles or just relax for the day. Operated by Recruit Lifestyle Co., Ltd., the business began as a print magazine in 2000 before launching its website in 2007. As a marketplace for salons specializing in beauty, therapy, and spa treatments, the website initially ran AdWords brand campaigns on search alongside offline advertising to reach potential customers.

Hot Pepper Beauty needed to drive more appointment bookings while lowering its CPA. The beauty portal also hoped to find a scalable way to reach users when they searched for salon services. To meet its goals, Hot Pepper Beauty and its paid search partner agency implemented Dynamic Search Ads in 2014.

A stronger search presence with DSA

DSA helped Hot Pepper Beauty reach more customers in the moments they searched for relevant information—without needing to manage keywords or ads. This gave the beauty portal's campaigns a strong foundation with broader exposure for searches that weren’t covered by existing keywords.

While DSA delivered great results for the brand, Hot Pepper Beauty's campaigns still required a significant amount of time and effort to manage. With over 50,000 salons featured on the brand's website, the campaigns were driven by hundreds of thousands of keywords within individual ad groups. "Our accounts used to be managed by an agency, but we were seeking a way to manage them directly," says Tomoyuki Ishii, manager of digital marketing at Recruit Lifestyle Co., Ltd.

Hoping to take its account management in-house, the website decided to simplify its DSA workflow in 2016 and pair DSA campaigns with page feeds.

Page feeds dramatically simplify inventory management

Hot Pepper Beauty used page feeds in the Business data section of AdWords for its salon inventory. Page feeds lets advertisers create DSA for a specific set of URLs from their site, automatically create ads for new products as soon as they're posted, and create unique DSA campaigns using custom labels.

"This new approach helped us reduce our operational workload dramatically, while still enabling us to meet our targets."

Once Hot Pepper Beauty set up its page feeds, Google used the information to determine when to show the website's ads. The brand used custom labels to refine its targeting by marketing objective, while significantly streamlining its campaign management—all without keywords. Custom labels gave the beauty portal complete control over which URLs to include in its Auto targets so it could choose to activate or pause ads for a specific salon at any time. Ad customizers made it easy for Hot Pepper Beauty to update all of its ad text from one central place using the same feed. Lastly, the brand set Target CPAs to optimize its bids for conversions. Google then adjusted the bids automatically according to the custom labels to meet the website's marketing goals.

DSA + page feeds delivers more conversions, lowers costs

The new marketing strategy enabled Hot Pepper Beauty to reduce nine DSA campaigns with thousands of ad groups to a single ad group for each. This reduced campaign management workload by 90% compared with standard keyword campaigns, enabling the beauty brand to move its AdWords account management to its in-house marketing team. In addition to an improved workflow, Hot Pepper Beauty's DSA with page feeds campaigns performed better compared to its standard keyword campaigns, delivering a 8% lower CPA. The website also saw 23% higher CTRs, while CPC decreased by 4%.